2023.01.08 | “Field Trip!”
“Field Trip!”
Rev. Dr. Arlene K. Nehring
Eden United Church of Christ
First Sunday after Epiphany
January 8, 2023
Matt. 3:13-17 | Español
Today we celebrate one of the festivals in the Christian year--the Feast of Epiphany. This celebration has evolved over the centuries and is now observed in a variety of ways around the globe. Despite the variations, all celebrations reveal the Christian belief that Jesus is the Messiah for one and all.
So that we can better appreciate the various ways that Epiphany is celebrated around the world, the ways that various cultural practices have merged and morphed over the years, today’s sermon is essentially a cultural field trip.
As we meander through the message, I will describe the two biblical stories that have most influenced Chrisitan celebrations of Epiphany. They are the Visitation of the Magi and the Baptism of Christ.
Historically and culturally speaking, the Visitation of the Magi has been the prominent underlying narrative shaping celebrations in the Eastern Rite and Latin Christian cultures, while accounts of Christ’s baptism have been most formative for Epiphany observances in the Western Church and Anglo-Saxon cultures.
II
In Matthew’s Visitation of the Magi, the three kings arrive at the nativity of Christ from distant lands. They bring the little baby Jesus exotic gifts--gifts fit for a king--and they return to their homelands by a different way, to avoid an encounter with Jesus’ arch enemy, the Roman Emperor Cesar Agustus.
New Testament scholars Marcus J. Borg and John Dominic Crossan, explain in their book The First Christmas, published in New York City by Harper One, in 2007, p. 144 that the magis’ visit to the manger illustrates Jesus’ international and cross-cultural significance, in that the Magi were kings from Gentile nations who came to worship, Jesus, who Christians understand to be King of the Jews, and ultimately the King of Kings.
Francis Hare, an 18th century British pastor and church historian, explained in his Epiphany sermon on January 6, 1700 at St. Mary’s Church that the magi’s identities have evolved over time and through various folk traditions, until eventually the three kings became known as Melchior, King of Persia; Gaspar, King of India; and Balthazar, King of Arabia. (Hare, p. 13-14)
In some traditions, Pastor Hare explained, the magi rode camels, while in others, the magi each rode a different beast of burden: a camel, an elephant, and a horse or donkey. The magis’ gifts (gold, frankincense, and myrrh) were precious and rare. They symbolized worldly wealth, political power, and the presence of the divine.
Gold has always been prized and has long served as a form of international currency.
Myrrh is a bitter perfumed oil that was burned by the Jewish priests during worship. It was also used for medicinal and spiritual healings, and it was used as a burial spice in the days before embalming practices were developed.
Remember that in John’s Easter story, Nicodemus brought a mixture of myrrh and aloes to the tomb and used them to prepare Jesus’ body for burial. In the context of Jesus’ birth story, the mention of myrrh foreshadows Christ’s crucifixion and death. The doom and gloom to which myrrh alludes is explained in the fourth verse of the well known Christmas carol “We Three Kings.” The traditional refrain go like this:
Myrrh is mine; its bitter perfume
breathes a life of gathering gloom;
sorrowing, sighing, bleeding, dying,
sealed in the stone-cold tomb.
The third gift mentioned in Matthew’s gospel and the familiar carol is frankincense. Like gold and myrrh, frankincense was also precious. It was a fragrant resin harvested from rare trees grown in the Middle East, and used only in the sanctuary by the Jewish high priests. This gift symbolized Jesus’ role as the High Priest in the Judeo-Christian tradition.
In modern England, Brits celebrate Three Kings Day by baking and eating three cakes (one for each king). Before the cakes are put in the oven, the baker secretly stirs a dried bean into one of the three cakes. (The bean symbolizes the baby Jesus. Hiding the bean in a cake is symbolic of the Holy Family’s flight to Egypt and escape from Herod’s massacre of the innocents.) Whoever finds the bean in their slice of cake wins a prize.
III
The way that we celebrate Epiphany at Eden Church these days reflects a conflation of some Eastern traditions such as those that I’ve just described, and our celebrations include influences from Western European traditions and Latin cultures.
Our current practices began to unfold twelve years ago when an ad hoc group of volunteers from the congregation and community worked together to share groceries and provide a traditional Mexican New Year’s meal for the congregation and commuinity.
Pam Winthers, Peggy and Dan Apperson, Drew Nettinga, and I gathered groceries from Hope 4 the Heart on Meekland Avenue, and placed them on an assembly loop around the boardroom tables in the Norberg Room. We made ourselves dizzy going round and round the tables filling red grocery bags procured by the E-Team.
Stephanie Spencer and Coco Ramirez shopped at the Super Mercado on East 14th and bought all of the ingredients need for red pozole (pork soup), ponche (fruit punch), and rosca de reyes (the kings bread), including an ice chest filled with pork neck bones which provided all the flavor for the soup. (Sometimes it’s best not to know what’s in the recipe.)
Our friends Coco Ramirez, Laura Andrade, and Imelda de la Cruz, Coco’s three youngest children (including her twin boys who were 2 ½ at the time) and Stephanie and I worked in the OHK until 1am the night before the event preparing the pozole.
Then we went home for a little sleep and came back at 7 a.m. to finish the garnishes, make the ponche, and set the tables. Fortunately, Theressa Collier and Drew Nettinga arrived early too and helped prepare the garnishes or we would have never had the food on the table at lunch time. Oh yah, and then I led the worship service in between kitchen shifts. In the end we served 50 families from the congregation and community, and sent every family home with a bag of groceries.
Over the years we built on the ideas hatched that first Compañeras Christmas. Members of Congregation Shir Ami, the Reform Synagogue in Castro Valley, for example, sent their youth advisors and teen mitzvah club members to help us break down commercial quantities of rice and beans into family-size portions, and wrap Christmas presents for our mostly Spanish-speaking Roman Catholic neighborhood children.
Stephanie Spencer and Corina Vassaure, a former Compeñras Coordinator, conned some of the dads into playing the part of the kings, including dressing up in Christmas pageant bathrobes and make-shift crowns. They supervised the piñata bashing, handed out cuties and candy, and took pictures with the children.
Somewhere around year three or four of Eden’s Tres Reyes festivals we made friends with Aisha Knowles, who was the PIO for AC Fire, but who we knew as “The Queen of Toys.” Aisha hooked us up with one of her fire-fighter friends, Miguel, who works at the downtown Castro Valley station. He, in turn, hooked us up with Santa, who made it possible for us to provide every child in attendance with a Christmas gift.
The COVID-19 pandemic has wreaked havoc on our Tres Reyes Fiesta in recent years, but our Emergency Food Delivery Team still found a way to provide 350 families with pozole, fresh fruit, diapers, candy, and toys via our drive-thru version of Comida para Cherryland.
Due to delays in AC contracting and funding this year, we are not able to provide the traditional new year’s meal this Sunday. But we will share groceries, toys, and baby wipes and diapers with the 500 families, who now patronize our Comida.
IV
Looking back 12 years, I realize that Eden’s earlier celebrations of Epiphany were quite different. Rather than being the best attended feast day of the year, it was a day of low attendance when people stayed home, slept in, and packed away their Christmas decorations.
So we don’t throw the little baby Jesus out with the baptimsal water, I’m circling back today to refresh our memories, not only of Eden’s former ways of celebrating this day, and the Western Epiphany traditions which are associated with the Baptism of Christ.
As a child, I thought that baptism was the sole purview of the Christian Church. I learned in college that most cultures practice rites of passage for welcoming newcomers into their group that are similar to our Christian celebrations of baptism.
Our celebrations of baptism, especially believer’s baptism, are grounded in Jewish and pagan cleansing rituals. And, Christian infant baptismal practices have parallels with Jewish baby-naming celebrations.
Orthodox and neo-orthodox views of Christian baptism hold that participation in this sacrament are necessary for a person’s original sin to be washed away, for individual sins to be forgiven, for human healing to be possible, and for souls to be fit for heaven.
Progressive views of baptism, by contrast, have focused more on God’s role in the sacrament than human’s moreroles, and more on the divine gift of grace rather than the candidate’s ontological or moral deficiencies. Consider for example that Jesus does not repent of sin in Matthew 3. Instead, God affirms that Jesus is God’s child, God’s Beloved, with whom God is well pleased.
Sadly, over the centuries, Christians have wasted a lot of time arguing about how much water to use when celebrating the sacrament--a little or a lot--and whether to baptize people as infants or beliers. As a consequence, we have been vulnerable to missing the point of Jesus’ baptism. We have nearly missed that everyone of us is a child of God, that we are loved beyond our wildest imaginations, and that we are pleasing in God’s sight--just like Jesus.
V
I’ll stop here with our field trip and reiterate the cross-cultural Christian view that Christ is the Messiah and his fundamental mission was and is to share God’s pure, unabashed love and grace with every human being. We might not deserve it. We can’t earn it. We can only receive it. This is what the feast is about. Bienvenido a la fiesta!